Animal Well-Being

Maintaining optimal sow body condition is an important strategy to maximize animal well-being and sow lifetime productivity. Most commercial producers feed gestating sows based on a visual (subjective) measure of body condition. However, the majority of barn workers, farm managers and service people are not highly trained in estimating body composition.

With feed being the largest cost facing pork producers, it is imperative that producers understand current production and to make informed management decisions regarding feed. They also need to understand exactly what is being measured and how to interpret this data, otherwise costly mistakes can be made....More

Two years of intense research at the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Maryland has resulted in 18 piglets that represent a breakthrough in the field of genetic engineering....More

Hog operations will benefit from a Smithfield Foods gift that will support antibiotic alternatives studies in the Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine that will investigate methods to enhance animal well-being and production efficiency....More

Niche marketing evokes thoughts of a value-added product — ways to manufacture, process or market a product to achieve the most value. Compart Family Farms of Nicollet, Minn., has achieved a valued product, both in genetic lines and finished pork, but the journey to get there wasn’t easy....More

The American Association of Swine Veterinarians installed its slate of new officers at the group's 46th annual meeting held recently in Orlando, Fla. Ron Brodersen was installed as the president, succeeding Michelle Sprague. George Charbonneau is president-elect, and Alejandro “Alex” Ramirez is now vice president....More

Senators have reintroduced the “Prevention of Antibiotic Resistance Act,” legislation that would require the Food and Drug Administration to withdraw its approval of medically important antibiotics used for “disease prevention or control that are at high risk of abuse,” unless the producer of the drug can demonstrate that its use in agriculture does not pose a risk to human health....More

McDonald’s announced that it will only source chickens raised without antibiotics that are important to human medicine. It is expected that this will take place within two years for all of McDonald’s 14,000 U.S. restaurants....More

Originally launched in 2002, the Transport Quality Assurance program is designed to help swine transporters, producers and handlers understand how to handle, move and transport pigs, tying in the potential impacts those actions have on pig well-being and pork quality....More